page_title: Clark Gable
section_title: 1930–1935: Early success
hierarchical_section_title: Clark Gable / Life and career / 1930–1935: Early success
caption_attribution_description: Cropped screenshot of Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert from the trailer for the film It Happened One Night.
context_page_description: William Clark Gable was an American film actor, often referred to as "The King of Hollywood". He had roles in more than 60 motion pictures in a wide variety of genres during a career that lasted 37 years, three decades of which was as a leading man. Gable died of a heart attack; his final on screen appearance was of an aging cowboy in The Misfits, released posthumously in 1961.
  Born and raised in Ohio, Gable traveled to Hollywood where he began his film career as an extra in Hollywood silent films between 1924 and 1926. He progressed to supporting roles for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and his first leading role in 1931's Dance, Fools, Dance was alongside Joan Crawford, who requested him for the part. His next role, in the romantic drama Red Dust with reigning sex symbol Jean Harlow, made him MGM's biggest male star. Gable won the Academy Award for Best Actor for Frank Capra's It Happened One Night, co-starring Claudette Colbert. He was nominated for the same award for his roles as Fletcher Christian in Mutiny on the Bounty, and as Rhett Butler opposite Vivien Leigh's Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind.
context_section_description: In 1930, after his impressive appearance as the seething and desperate character Killer Mears in the Los Angeles stage production of The Last Mile, Gable was offered a contract with Pathe Pictures. His only film for them and first role in a sound picture was as the unshaven villain in their low-budget William Boyd Western, The Painted Desert (1931). The studio experienced financial problems after the film's delayed release, so Gable left for work at Warner Bros.
  The same year in Night Nurse, Gable played a villainous chauffeur who knocked Barbara Stanwyck's character unconscious for trying to save two ill children. The supporting role was originally slated for James Cagney until the release of The Public Enemy catapulted him to star status. "His ears are too big and he looks like an ape", said Warner Bros. executive Darryl F. Zanuck about Gable, after testing him for the lead in the studio's gangster drama Little Caesar (1931). After his failed screen test for Zanuck, Gable was signed in 1930 by MGM's Irving Thalberg for $650 week. He hired as his agent the well-connected Minna Wallis, a sister of producer Hal Wallis, and whose clients included actresses Claudette Colbert, Myrna Loy and Norma Shearer.
  MGM was looking to expand its stable of male stars, and Gable fit the bill. He first worked mainly in supporting roles, making two pictures in 1931 with Wallace Beery.: first a supporting role in The Secret Six, then a part almost as large as the film's star Beery in the naval aviation film Hell Divers. MGM's publicity manager Howard Strickling developed Gable's studio image with Screenland magazine playing up his "lumberjack-in-evening-clothes" persona.
  To increasing popularity, MGM frequently paired him with well-established female stars. Joan Crawford asked for him as her co-star in Dance, Fools, Dance (1931). This was his first starring role. The electricity of the pair was recognized by studio executive Louis B. Mayer, who would not only put them in seven more films but also began reshooting "Complete Surrender", replacing John Mack Brown as Crawford's leading man and retitling the film Laughing Sinners (1931). His fame and public visibility after A Free Soul (1931), in which he played a gangster who shoved the character played by Norma Shearer, ensured that Gable never played a supporting role again. He received extensive fan mail as a result of his performance; the studio took notice. The Hollywood Reporter wrote "A star in the making has been made, one that, to our reckoning, will outdraw every other star ... Never have we seen audiences work themselves into such enthusiasm as when Clark Gable walks on the screen."
  Gable co-starred in Susan Lenox (Her Fall and Rise) (1931) with Greta Garbo, and in Possessed (1931), a film about an illicit romantic affair, with Joan Crawford (who was then married to Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.). Adela Rogers St. Johns later dubbed Gable and Crawford's real-life relationship as "the affair that nearly burned Hollywood down". Louis B. Mayer threatened to terminate both their contracts, and for a while, they kept apart when Gable shifted his attentions to Marion Davies as he costarred with her in Polly of the Circus (1932). Gable was considered for the role of Tarzan in Tarzan the Ape Man, but lost out to Johnny Weissmuller's more imposing physique and superior swimming prowess. Gable then starred as the romantic lead in Strange Interlude (1932), reteaming with Shearer, the second of three films they would make together for MGM.
  Next, Gable starred with Jean Harlow in the romantic comedy-drama Red Dust (1932) set on a rubber plantation in Indo-China. Gable portrayed a plantation manager involved with Harlow's wisecracking prostitute; however, upon her arrival, Gable's character started to pursue Mary Astor's prim, classy newlywed. While some critics thought Harlow stole the show, many agreed that Gable was a natural screen partner.
  Gable's "unshaven love-making" with braless Jean Harlow in Red Dust made him MGM's most important romantic leading man. With Gable established as a star, MGM posi
caption: Gable and Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night (1934), his Academy Award-winning performance
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